At present, the use of teleconference systems in commercial and corporate settings has increased dramatically in facilitating meetings and conferences between people in remote locations, reducing the need for travel so as to bring these people physically together in order to conduct the meetings or conferences. In general, teleconference systems allow users (i.e., people) of a teleconference system, in two or more remote locations, to communicate interactively with each other via live, simultaneous two-way video streams, audio streams, or both. Some teleconference systems (such as, for example, Cisco WebEx provided by Cisco Systems, Inc. of San Jose, Calif., GoToMeeting provided by Citrix Systems, Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., Zoom provided by Zoom Video Communications of San Jose, Calif., Google Hangouts by Alphabet Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., and Skype® provided by Microsoft Corporation, of Redmond, Wash.) also allow users to exchange digital documents such as, for example, images, text, video and any others.
A limitation to teleconference systems is that they do not allow users to experience the typical interactions that occur at live meetings when all the users are physically present at the same location. Most teleconference systems utilize remote communication devices (such as, for example, video terminals, personal computers (both desktop and portable) and mobile devices such as, for example, tablets, smartphones, etc.) that display video and play audio from the meeting, or conference, on a video display that may vary in size from approximately 3 inches to approximately 65 inches based on the type of communication devices or video display. As a result, the remote users of the teleconference system are typically limited to viewing the interactions of the meeting, or conference, through a “window” of the meeting, or conference, produced by the video display, which may be the screen of a mobile device, computer monitor, or large video display.
This results in a user interface that produces a flat “thumbnail” style people and content experience for the remote users of the teleconference system attending the meeting or conference. Generally, this user interface only allows users to see framed individuals (i.e., other people attending the meeting or conference) in a gallery experience with a lot of negative space in the user interface that is not engaging for the remote users.
Additionally, the remote users are simply monitoring cameras from fixed positions which may be located either at the location of the physical meeting, or conference, or at the location of other remote users attending the meeting, or conference. Moreover, in some teleconference systems, some remote users may see multiple displays of fixed streams of video data on their video displays with very few options for allowing each participant to change their views to see important or salient portions of the shared media. Therefore, the resulting user interface of these types of teleconference systems typically leaves the remote users bored and unengaged.
As such, there is a need for an improved teleconferencing system that addresses these issues. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.